More Blogging, More Leads

Hubspot bloggingIt’s a fact.  Increasing the total number of blog posts on your website, and blogging more often, will increase traffic to your site in a massive way.

A few facts:  (courtesy of Hubspot’s Marketing Benchmarks report)

Companies that blog 15 or more times per month get five times more traffic than companies that don’t blog

Small businesses (1-10 employees) tend to see the biggest increase in traffic when they post more articles.

Companies that increase blogging from 3-5 times a month to 6-8 times per month almost double their leads.

B2B companies that blog only once or twice a month generate 70% more leads than those who don’t blog.

An average company sees a 45% growth in traffic when increasing total blog articles from 11-20 to 21-50 articles.

B2C companies see a 59% increase in traffic after growing total blog articles from 100 to 200.

Companies with over 200 blog articles have more than five times the leads than those with 10 or fewer.

This is phenomenal stuff.  The facts are in – blogging is the way to go, and the more you blog, the more traffic comes to your site.

Here are a few tips if you’re considering how you can address blogging:

Content is actually very easy to find.  Sign up for anything and everything related to your industry, and every time you come across an email with some content that would be useful to your market, file it away in your emails.  Then, once a week, sit down and dash off a few blog posts using bits and pieces of that content.  The starting point is the hardest: combining it into your own words is actually very simple.

Consider buying in content – but do NOT post it without some changes and customisations.  Google is continually changing its algorithms to get smarter and smarter about the most relevant sites for a search.  If you buy in ‘canned’ content, and change absolutely nothing, Google will recognise that it’s not original, and it won’t help your search rankings at all.  However, if you start with pre-written content and adjust a few sentences here and there, add some specifics, use the keywords you should be using, then you’ll get a lot further.

Hire someone to do the technical posting for you.  This is different from the actual copywriting.  There’s nothing wrong with getting a ‘ghost writer’ to create original content for your business. (Heck, we do it ourselves for many businesses.)  But even if you do the writing yourself, the technical aspects of posting a blog to your website can waste valuable business-running time, depending how experienced you are with it.  Copying what you’ve written, uploading it, fixing the formatting, sourcing an image, saving the image with a name that includes the right keywords, uploading the image, re-formatting, choosing categories, previewing the post, scheduling or publishing it, and then posting the link to all your social media accounts can take 20-30 minutes per post.  If you’re a perfectionist, it could take even longer.  I’ve whittled it down after many years of experience, but it’s still not an easy task. And if you’re blogging 15 times a month, that’s over five hours simply to post blog articles.  And that doesn’t include any writing time!  If you really want to blog, you could be spending two full days a month just on blogging.  Think about your chargeout rate for two days of your time.  It’s well worth paying someone to do the actual blog posting for you – and it’s very likely they can help with copywriting, too.

Share your blog posts.  The more you share content via social media, the more likely it is you’ll gain new followers and traffic to your site.  Every time you post a new blog article, share it to your Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, and Google Plus pages (and possibly others if you have them).  Remember that having a Google Plus page for your business increases your findability online – Google loves Google.

Make it easy to share.  At the end of each post, make it easy for others to share your article on their social media platforms.  Use Shareaholic to give multiple options, so that whatever your readers’ preferred communication tool is, you’ve made it available.   (Sorry, we’re still sorting out a few issues that means Shareaholic isn’t operational on this blog yet. It will be soon!)

Generating traffic is only the first step.  Getting visitors to engage with you on your site is the next.  How does your site measure up? Do you talk about your services, your people, how great you are, or do you ask them questions too?  Also, make sure you have calls to action on every page.  Simple ones, the kind that people want to complete, like requesting a free report, or following the conversation on Twitter, or watching a video, or registering to a webinar.

However much you blog, the point is that even blogging once or twice a month sets you far and away above the competition.  Don’t neglect this incredible opportunity to be more visible online.